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State Ed Commissioner John King talks with reporters in a press gaggle after Wednesday's hearing (Rick Karlin/Times Union)

Teachers, parents and legislators have been in a growing slow-boil uproar over the standardized tests that play a role in the state’s new Common Core curriculum for K-12 students, and now they have something else to get upset about — concerns about student privacy in light of the massive data
collection and storing the state Education Department is launching as part of a broad initiative to use such information as a tool and make it available to parents.

Digitizing student data, which ranges from test scores to statistics on absenteeism, which the Education Department wants to eventually make available to parents through local school system online “dashboards” is funded, at least in the beginning, largely through federal funding as part
of the Race to the Top Program.

But along the way, lots of questions cropped up about the protection of the data and on Wednesday the curiosity turned to outright ire against the Atlanta-based grant-funded non-profit firm that is organizing and maintaining the data, inBloom.

Specifically, members of the Assembly Education Committee said they were furious that representatives of the organization declined to appear before them at the nearly day-long hearing.

“I was very disappointed. I reached out to the inBloom company and they refused (to come),” said Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Cathy Nolan. Then other members of the Ed Committee proceeded to rip, criticize and generally berate Ed Commissioner John King over the plan as well as firm’s absence.

Among the possible remedies suggested by Nolan: sending subpoenas to inBloom and putting forth legislation that would require parents to “opt in” to the data collection.

iBloom spokesman Adam Gaber said in an email that “Due to prior commitments, inBloom informed Assemblyman Nolan that we were unable to send a representative to today’s meeting.”

“These people wouldn’t come. That’s a red flag,” said Nolan. “It doesn’t speak well when people say they won’t come and talk to us.”

“Our ability to protect our privacy has not caught up with the mechanisms we use to collect and store data,” added Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, who earlier said it was “outrageous” for state education officials to suggest school districts couldn’t operate without the data program. O’Donnell has proposed an opt-in bill.

Others were just as harsh, including longtime education critic Leonie Haimson who said the data system was part of an effort to commercialize data about kids.

State Education officials maintained that there is a lot of misinformation, and much of their effort is aimed at integrating the countless data bases, email systems, passwords and other storage systems that now contain student data. That data by in large has been collected for years but it isn’t well integrated.

King noted that wealthy school districts already have “dashboards” that allow parents to access data about their kids and the data contains information that can help guide educational approaches for kids. He added that inBloom uses “non proprietary” software which should help spark more inventiveness in gathering and analyzing student data.
“That’s not just about data. It’s about ensuring that parents and educators have access to curriculum and materials,” said King.

Nor were all the speakers dead set against the concept of using “Big Data” to further education.

“We need data information systems,” said School Boards Association lobbyist David Little who added that regional BOCES already gather and store lots of student data and people tend to trust them.

And while acknowledging the importance of data, Robert Lowry of the Superintendents Council said “they are building fabulous tools that districts didn’t ask for.”

He as well as some others also noted that dealing with such Big Data and maintaining local “dashboards” will likely cost money once the federal funding runs out, which will likely happen in 2014 or 2015.

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